The National Security Agency has moved most of its data to a classified computing cloud that allows analysts to rapidly "connect the dots" across all of the agency's data sources, officials said Thursday.

"The NSA has been systematically moving almost all its mission into this big data fusion environment," Chief Information Officer Greg Smithberger told NextGov.

It is called the Intelligence Community GovCloud, he said.

"Right now, almost all NSA's mission is being done in [GovCloud], and the productivity gains and the speed at which our analysts are able to put together insights and work higher-level problems has been really amazing."

The goal behind the multi-year effort is to consolidate all of the NSA's vast data resources into a single repository that can be used by the NSA and other intelligence agencies, according to NextGov.

Smithberger described GovCloud as a single integrated "big data-fusion environment."

The GovCloud is one of two major cloud initiatives by the nation's intelligence community, NextGov reports.

Four years ago, the CIA awarded a $600 million contract to Amazon Web Services to develop a commercial cloud environment for the agencies.

The C2S cloud created by Amazon now provides utility computing services to the intelligence community.

According to Smithberger, GovCloud employs algorithms, among other features.

NSA data is meta-tagged with bits of information, such as where it came from and who is authorized to see it.

This ensures analysts only have access to intelligence data they've been cleared to see, he said.

"This environment allows us to run analytic tools and do machine-assisted data fusion and big data analytics, and apply a lot of automation to facilitate and accelerate what humans would like to do, and get the machines to do it for them," Smithberger said.

Analysts can "interactively ask questions" of the data in the cloud environment, receiving answers in "humanly readable form," he explained.

GovCloud is operated by the same commercial hardware used in data centers owned by Facebook, Amazon and other industry firms, NextGov reports.

However, that cloud's hardware customized by NSA-developed software and other agency intellectual property.

"It's really a hybrid of the latest and greatest commercial technology," Smithberger told NextGov, "but a lot of custom NSA technology and a lot of unique development we've done to actually create these outcomes."